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Mortar   Listen
noun
Mortar  n.  (Arch.) A building material made by mixing lime, cement, or plaster of Paris, with sand, water, and sometimes other materials; used in masonry for joining stones, bricks, etc., also for plastering, and in other ways.
Mortar bed, a shallow box or receptacle in which mortar is mixed.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mortar" Quotes from Famous Books



... FOR FORGES.—Mix dry 20 parts of fire clay, 20 parts cast-iron turnings, one part of common salt, and 1/2 part sal ammoniac, and then add water while stirring, so as to form a mortar of the proper consistency. The mixture will become very hard when ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... particularly with children. For infantile catarrh, after its first feverish stage, Aniseed tea is very useful. It should be made by pouring half-a-pint of boiling water on two teaspoonfuls of the seeds, bruised in a mortar, and given when cold in doses of one, two, or three teaspoonfuls, according to the age of the child. For the relief of flatulent stomach-ache, whether in children or in adults, from five to fifteen drops of the essence may be given on a lump of sugar, or mixed with two ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon un- covered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe

... could give no better notion of his amiability than by mentioning that he was known among her friends as the Cavaliere Frattanto. This praise, Odo thought, seemed scarcely to the cousin's liking; but he carried it off with the philosophic remark that it is the mortar between the bricks ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... when the baby crept up, and tipped over sick George's basin of pussy-willow and cider, which was steeping in one corner of the fireplace. There was no harm done, only Job lost his patience, and cried, and for five minutes there was a perfect Bedlam of baby-screams, chopping-knives, and mortar-pestles, and in the midst of it, the sound of the hired men ...
— Little Grandmother • Sophie May

... Pan, loving the woods and waters, and preferring to go to them (when my heart was stirred thereto by that mysterious power which, as I conceive, cares little for worship made stately and to order on certain recurring calendar days) rather than to most of the brick and mortar pens that are supposed to hold in some way that which the visible universe no more contains than the works of his hands contain the sculptor who makes them; for I take it that the glittering show revealed by the mightiest telescope, or by the hope mightier even than the imagination ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... answered Blount, and followed after him to the assay office, which Wiley had hurriedly fitted up. Wiley took a piece of scheelite and pounded it in a mortar until it was fine as flour, then dropped it into a test-tube and boiled it over a flame in a solution of hydrochloric ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge

... modern improvements, consisted of a double line of walls, guarded by towers, pierced by strongly-fortified gates, and surrounded by a deep and wide moat. The ramparts were built of quarried stone, which, though much harder than sandstone, was far more difficult to bind together with mortar. In view of this fact, we may well be surprised that a place so weakly fortified was able for two long months to withstand the vehement siege operations of the whole Swedish army—an army so brave and so highly trained in the art of ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous

... him over her spectacles and thought how bad so much reading must be for the eyes, until the tinkling of her shop-bell called her away to a customer. At twenty-five minutes to six he put the book back in the window-sill, dashed a few crumbs from his jacket, assumed a mortar-board cap that was lying on the tea-caddy, and went forth to his evening ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... my eyes rested upon a dainty figure sitting in the chair by the dying fire, evidently engaged upon some absorbing occupation. It was a woman clad in a sprigged silk gown, the image of my lady of the dining-room portrait. What was she doing? Seemingly pounding some substance in a small mortar. As I gazed astounded a slight knock sounded on the door. My Lady seemed extraordinarily perturbed; she started violently, seemed to shake something white from the mortar as she gathered it hastily to her, moved swiftly with the slightest rustle as of a scurrying mouse and vanished through the door ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... "Bricks without mortar would make a very bad wall." There was quite enough in Miss Jemima's disposition to make excellent mortar: the Doctor ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... vpon a round foundation of wickers artificially wrought and compacted together: the roofe whereof consisteth (in like sorte) of wickers, meeting aboue into one little roundell, out of which roundell ascendeth a necke like vnto a chimney, which they couer with white felte, and oftentimes they lay mortar or white earth vpon the sayd felt, with the powder of bones, that it may shine white. And sometimes also they couer it with blacke felte. The sayd felte on the necke of their house, they doe garnish ouer with beautifull varietie of pictures. Before the doore likewise they hang a felt curiously ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... accession of comfort the house received within from this addition to its size, its beauty, externally, was not improved by it, and Mr. Rogers stood before the offending edifice, surveying it with a sardonic sneer that I should think even brick and mortar must have found it hard to bear. He had hardly uttered his three first disparaging bitter sentences, of utter scorn and abhorrence of the architectural abortion, which, indeed it was, when Mrs. Grote herself made her appearance in her usual ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... remains of the repairing process, which for so long a time had made the farmhouse a scene of dire confusion, driving its inmates nearly distracted, except when they remembered for whose sake they endured so much, inhaling clouds of lime, stepping over heaps of mortar, tearing their dress skirts on sundry nails projecting from every conceivable quarter, and wondering the while if the masons ever would finish or the ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... of the city of Nepi, where the Falisco River flows and empties into a deep chasm, was in ancient times fortified with high walls built of long, square blocks of tuff laid upon each other without mortar, like the walls of neighboring Falerii. Some remains of Nepi's walls may still be seen near the Porta Romana, although much of the material has been used in constructing the castle and for the high ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... nine field-pieces, two howitzers, and one mortar were brought down to the brink of the stream as soon as it dark. Working parties were likewise ordered out, by whom was thrown up opposite to the schooner; and having got all things in readiness, at dawn on the 26th ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... wood is especially noticeable in the buildings, which are made of sun-dried bricks, or, more frequently, of stones of medium size which are agglomerated with a kind of mortar composed of clay and chopped straw. The houses of the settled inhabitants are two stories high, their fronts whitewashed, and their window-sashes painted with lively colors. The flat roof forms a terrace which is decorated with wild flowers, and here, during good weather, the inhabitants spend ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch

... stood and eyed the builders. They had a plan to render less their labors; Workmen in olden times would mount a ladder With hodded heads, but these stretched forth a pole From the wall's pinnacle, they placed a pulley Athwart the pole, a rope athwart the pulley; To this a basket dangled; mortar and bricks Thus freighted, swung securely to the top, And in the empty basket workmen twain Precipitate, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... obstruction of their favorite walk with dismay. So strong was their feeling that when the wall was completed the young men of the town repaired there in the night and tore it down. It was rebuilt, the mortar being mixed with broken glass. This infuriated the people to such an extent that the whole populace, in broad daylight, accompanied by the summer visitors, destroyed the wall and threw the materials into the sea. Lawrence, bent on maintaining what he considered his rights, called ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... of the hut was fragrant with the scent of herbs which were strewn all over the floor, and on a wooden stool in the middle lay a broken pestle and mortar. ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various

... Mrs. Parlin was making currant jelly, she allowed Prudy to stay in the kitchen, and see her strain the beautiful crimson juice. But as for Alice, she had been found pounding eggs in a mortar, and must be taken away. She was placed in care of Susy, who led her out upon the piazza, where she could watch the people passing by. "Pedadder!" cried Alice, showing her dimples. "Yes, piazza; so it is," said careless Susy, beginning to read a fairy ...
— Little Prudy's Dotty Dimple • Sophie May

... of every good shoe is a steel spring. I'll take the steel from my shoe. There's already one bar removed from the chuck-hole (No use trying to reproduce the dialect). If we saw out another bar, that will give us enough room for going through. Then it will be easy to dig out the mortar between the bricks, in the jail wall. Once out, we can make for the river bottoms, and, by wading in the water, even ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... Barnes, Medford, Mass., for permission to publish the photograph of Peregrine White's Mayflower mortar and pestle; ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... mortar of this historic town seem impregnated with the spirit of restful antiquity." (Extract from one of aunt Celia's letters.) Among the great men who have studied here are the Prince of Wales, Duke of Wellington, Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Philip ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... feet. I selected a site close above high water-mark, and commenced digging, and in fact worked a whole day at it, intending to line it with a mixture of sand and lime, of which I had several tubs for making mortar for repairing the brickwork of my homestead; but that very evening I discovered a natural fish pond, or rather a pool, that could be turned into one by ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... the saddle. It was the shifting of the weight that seemed to bring home to the grey filly the true facts of the case, and with the discovery she shot straight up into the air as if she had been fired from a mortar. The rope whistled through Johnny Connolly's fingers, and the point of the filly's shoulder laid him out on the ground with the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... and 4.1-inch howitzer quick firers threw a shell of thirty-two pounds. This howitzer had a range of more than 6,000 yards, and was a powerful weapon. The 30.5-centimeter mortars fired a shell of 858 pounds with a bursting charge of 56 pounds of ecrasite. The extreme range of this mortar was about six miles. Ten rounds could be fired each hour. Two guns and their ammunition lorries were drawn by three large tractors. An hour was required to get one of these guns ready ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... foundation of the new Rotunda in the garden which divides the Conservatori palace from that of the Caffarellis,—the residence of the German ambassador,—our workmen came upon a piece of a colossal fluted column of Pentelic marble, lying on a platform of squared stones, which were laid without mortar, in a decidedly archaic style. Were we in the presence of the remains of the famous Capitolium, or of one of the smaller temples within the Arx? To give this query a satisfactory answer, we must remember that the Capitoline Hill had two summits, ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... the teeth. A great number of machines, on the other hand, may be compared to a complete workman. Thus, the action of the mill which grinds grain has very little resemblance to the blowing of the wind or the running of the water, whereas the rising and falling of the pestle in the small mortar for throwing grenades corresponds to the motion of the arm. (Rau, Lehrbuch I, 125.) The infinite number of functions of which our members are capable is related to their inability to attain ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... rang; And Thin himself came day by day To push the work in every way. An artful builder, patent king Of all the local building ring, Who was there like him in the quarter For mortifying brick and mortar, Or pocketing the odd piastre By substituting lath and plaster? With plan and two-foot rule in hand, He by the foreman took his stand, With boisterous voice, with eagle glance To stamp upon extravagance. Far thrift of bricks and greed of guilders, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... unmistakable, characteristic, copyrighted smells of spring that belong to the-big-city-above-the-Subway, alone. The smells of hot asphalt, underground caverns, gasoline, patchouli, orange peel, sewer gas, Albany grabs, Egyptian cigarettes, mortar and the undried ink on newspapers. The inblowing air was sweet and mild. Sparrows wrangled happily everywhere outdoors. Never ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... recognized as Tom's, boomed out over the loud-speaker of the large jet ship near the edge of the clearing. "Now hear this! You are covered by an atomic mortar. Drop your guns ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell

... a family of six persons twelve months. As we have said, it can be made at home, but the process, though not difficult, is troublesome. It is made as follows:—A quantity of spinach has, after being thoroughly washed, to be pounded in a mortar until it becomes a pulp. This pulp is then placed in a very strong, coarse cloth, and the cloth is twisted till the juice of the spinach is squeezed out through the cloth. The amount of force required is very considerable and ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne

... fowls' livers and then let them simmer until tender in a little strong soup stock, adding some sliced mushroom, minced onion, and a little pepper and salt. When thoroughly done mince the whole finely, or pound it in a mortar. Now put it back in the saucepan and mix well with the yolks of sufficient eggs to make the whole fairly moist. Warm over the fire, stirring frequently until the mixture is quite thick, taking care ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum

... treasure-trove we made all haste to rejoin our companions. And now behold what a miracle of reanimation may be wrought by a few handfuls of bread grain! In a trice the Catawba had found a water-worn stone to serve for a mortar, and another for a pestle. These and the bag of corn were carried back to a sheltered ravine which we had crossed on our late advance; and here the Indian fell to work to grind the corn into coarse meal, whilst Yeates and I kindled a fire ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... [15] The lime or mortar here described, appears to be the terra puzzuolana or terras, a compound of lime and oxid of iron, which forms an indestructible cement, even under water; and the remarkably light stones ejected from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... Palmer streets in the town of Winnsboro, S.C. He is tall, thin and toothless, with watery eyes and a pained expression of weariness on his face. He is slow and deliberate in movements. He still works, and has just finished a day's work mixing mortar in the construction of a brick store building for Mr. Lauderdale. His boss says: 'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.' There is nothing organically wrong with Dan but he appears, in human anatomy, as Doctor Holmes's ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration

... thou be in the houses of men [who worship Mazda]. Salvation be to this man who worships thee in verity and truth, with wood in hand and baresma [sacred twigs] ready, with flesh in hand and holding too the mortar. 2. And mayst thou be [ever] fed with wood as the prescription orders. Yea, mayst thou have thy perfume justly, and thy sacred butter without fail, and thine andirons regularly placed. Be of full age as to thy nourishment, of the canon's age as to the measure ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... venerable school, discoursing of the deepest subjects of wisdom, in which sages might alone find themselves appropriately employed, and yet having its birth and deriving its first life from a society of artisans, whose only object was, apparently, the construction of material edifices of stone and mortar. ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... we haven't the money," remarked Euphemia, "it would be of no earthly use to look at the book. It would only make us doubt our own calculations. You might as well try to make brick without mortar, as ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton

... in plumed caps and curling hair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... apt to wonder sometimes what it is that makes the house homelike, and why there are such strong attachments to the old home. Surely it is the familiar aspect of the furnishings, rather than the bricks and mortar, that makes the old home so dear! To the original owners there was an individuality about every piece, although to the collector the same characteristics of well-known objects tell that in days gone by the cabinet-maker followed stereotyped lines, and there were but few who moved out of the regular ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... (tabuster) about that. Any one who cannot see that it is the foolish use of reverend things and not the things themselves that the satire hits, is hardly worth argument. But there is no doubt that this sort of mortar, framework, menstruum, canvas, or whatever way it may be best metaphored, helps the apparent continuity of the work marvellously, leaving, as it were, no rough edges or ill-mended joints. It is, to use an admirable phrase of Mr. Balfour's about ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... when walking by one of the locks on a disused canal in the Ock Valley, I saw a man engaged in a very artistic mode of catching crayfish. The lock was very old, and the brickwork above water covered with pennywort and crane's-bill growing where the mortar had rotted at the joints. In these same joints below water the crayfish had made holes or homes of some sort, and were sitting at the doors with their claws and feelers just outside, waiting, like ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... to be made as substantial as possible, and then to be covered with details agreeable to the eye. At the beginning of his career he had a defective sense of the harmonic ratios upon which a really musical building may be constructed out of mere bricks and mortar—such, for example, as the Church of S. Giustina at Padua. He was overweighted with ill-assimilated erudition; and all the less desirable licenses of Brunelleschi's school, especially in the abuse of square recesses, he adopted without hesitation. It ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... and treading them down. Wheat seems to like as firm a seed-bed as possible, for the best crop was always on the headland, where the turning of the horses and implements had reduced the soil to the condition of mortar. The seed would lie in the cold ground for many weeks before the blade made its appearance, but the men always said, "'Twill be heavy in the head when it lies long abed." It is cheering in late autumn ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... this building had seriously galled Hope's division, while engaged in forcing its way into the Secunderbagh, and Captain Peel, with the Naval Brigade, brought up the heavy guns against it. He took up his position within a few yards of the wall and opened a heavy fire, assisted by that of a mortar battery and a field battery of Bengal Artillery; the Highlanders covering the sailors and artillerymen as they worked their guns, by a tremendous fire upon the enemy's loopholes. So massive were the walls that it was several hours before even ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty

... whatever the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new. Fancy for a moment the difference for the worse, if all the grim, browned, rotted walls of Rome, with their peeling mortar, their thousand daubs of varying grays and yellows, their jutting brickwork and patched stonework, from whose intervals the cement has crumbled off, their waving weeds and grasses and flowers, now sparsely fringing their top, now thickly protruding from their sides, or clinging and making ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... have been changed, and are changing every year before our very eyes; but what can never be changed, in spite of some recent atrocities in brick and mortar, is the natural beauty of its gardens, and the historical character of its architecture. Whether Friar Bacon, as far back as the thirteenth century, admired the colleges, chapels, and gardens of Oxford, we do not know; and even if we did, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... afternoon there was less sun, more rain, and more wind; and at last the sun seemed to give it up; the wind grew to a hurricane, and the rain strove with it which should inhabit the space. The whole upper region was like a huge mortar, in which the wind was the pestle, and, with innumerable gyres, vainly ground at the rain. Gibbie drove his sheep to the refuge of a pen on the lower slope of a valley that ran at right angles to the wind, where they were sheltered by a rock behind, forming one side of the enclosure, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... are pounded in a mortar and reduced to a pulp; the mass is then placed in a conical mould of wood, and pressed. It remains in this until dry, when it presents the shape of a loaf of sugar, and is perfectly hard. The tobacco of the Ellyria tribe is shaped into cheeses, and frequently ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... were ten years old. Then the Sultan caused all the children to be brought to him, both boys and girls. The boys were apprenticed to masons, carpenters, and other tradesmen; others were employed to make mortar. The next year they were taught to drive the mules, the third to make adobe for building; the fourth year they learned to ride horses bareback, the fifth they were taught to ride in the saddle while using firearms. At the age of sixteen these boys became soldiers. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... shall send you with it a fine book which I have had printed of' Gray's poems, with drawings by another friend of mine, which I am sure will charm you, though none of them are quite well engraved, and some sadly. Adieu! I am all brick and mortar: the castle at Strawberry Hill grows so near a termination, that you must not be angry if I wish to have you see it. Mr. Bentley is going to make a drawing of the best view, which I propose to have engraved, and then you shall at least have some idea of that sweet little spot—little ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... these life-cars, therefore, arrangements are made for sending the hawser out from the shore to the ship. The apparatus by which this is accomplished consists, first, of a piece of ordnance called a mortar, made large enough to throw a shot of about six inches in diameter; secondly, the shot itself, which has a small iron staple set in it; thirdly, a long line, one end of which is to be attached to the staple in the shot, when the shot is thrown; and, fourthly, a rack ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... have been able to build it himself, he was thoroughly qualified to choose an architect. His choice fell upon Professor Aitchison, now R.A., and he probably hit upon the only man of his generation able to put his feeling into bricks and mortar, viz., the feeling for a beauty sedate, delicate, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... the harrow he may raise much wheat and corn. He could carry little on his shoulders, but he may transport much when aided by a horse and wagon, and still more when aided by a locomotive engine or a ship. He could convert little grain into flour when provided only with a pestle and mortar, but he may do much when provided with a mill. His wife could convert little cotton into cloth when provided only with a spinning-wheel and hand-loom, but her labour becomes highly productive when aided by the spinning-jenny and the power-loom. The more her labours and those ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... Uncle William was mending his chimney. He had built a platform to work on. Another man would have clung to the sloping roof while he laid the bricks and spread the mortar. But Uncle William had constructed an elaborate platform with plenty of room for bricks and the pail of mortar, and space in which to stretch his great legs. It was a comfortable place to sit and look out over Arichat harbor. Andy, who had watched the preparations with scornful ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee

... the farm, was a new school for the Hebrew shepherds, and set many an interesting problem for them to solve. They had to learn to build and repair houses. They were most often built of rough stones set in mud. The mud, when dry, became fairly hard, but not like mortar or cement. It was always easy for a thief "to dig through and steal," as Jesus so graphically described. Even though no thief came the dried mud was always crumbling, leaving holes between the stones through which snakes or lizards could crawl. In such a house, if a man should lean against the wall, ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... afflict them with their burdens, and they built for Pharaoh treasure-cities,(415) Pithom and Raamses—and the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour, and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field; all their service wherein they made them serve, was with rigour."(416) This king had two sons, Amenophis ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... exact position which each of the feet of the bricklayer should occupy with relation to the wall, the mortar box, and the pile of bricks, and so made it unnecessary for him to take a step or two toward the pile of bricks and back again each time a ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... preference be used. There is a good and a bad way of managing the process to ensue. To roughly seize a chump of wood and begin filing it away anyhow, collecting the residue and making a rough paste, will bring disappointment, as sure as houses built with wrongly mixed mortar. To put method into the matter, a piece of clear, knotless, soft, grained wood should be obtained and cut to a cylindrical form (diagram 19). A flat file of rather fine texture—this may be according to ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick

... ditches and his turnips when out of hunting season, his old love of good horsemanship made him watch the rider with interest and even pleasure. 'May I never!' muttered he to himself, 'if he's not coming at this wall.' And as the inclosure in question was built of large jagged stones, without mortar, and fully four feet in height, the upper course being formed of a sort of coping in which the stones stood edgewise, the attempt did look somewhat rash. Not taking the wall where it was slightly breached, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... workshops, where in winter everything of every sort is made; these four hundred and seventy men—if they do not work for the outer world—work for themselves and their island home. They build their churches and other edifices, make the bricks and mortar, their coats and clothes, their boots and shoes, mould their pottery, carve their wooden church ornamentations, shape them in plaster, or beat them in metal. There are goldsmiths and joiners, leather tanners ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... pachydermic frame draped in his gown, and his mortar-board cap on his head, for the Seniors were required to wear their regalia during Commencement week, was bellowing through a megaphone, as he stood on the steps of Bannister Hall, and Mr. Hicks, with his ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... fade away as he removed his soft, broad-brimmed hat and glanced across the too fresh-looking apartment. There was a smell of mortar still in the air, and a faint suggestion that at any moment green grass might appear between the interstices of the red-brick hearth. The room, yielding a little in the point of coldness, seemed to share Miss Nellie's fresh virginity, and, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... sentries were posted, and was thankful to see that none were opposite my cell window. By working away into the masonry, I found that I could clear one of the bars out of its socket, both above and below. The particles of stone and mortar which I dug out, I carefully brushed off into my hand and placed on the ground where my bed stood. By morning, to my great joy, I found that the bar moved, and that it could be wrenched out ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston

... time it was the most miserable place conceivable. There was a total absence of all ideas of comfort or arrangement. The houses were for the most part built of such unsubstantial materials as stick and mud plastered over with mortar—pretty enough in exterior, but rotten in ten or twelve years. The only really good residence was a fine stone building erected by Sir Edward Barnes when governor of Ceylon. To him alone indeed are we indebted for the existence of a sanitarium. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... Mantga Vallon, entered from the Chemin de Mantga (see plan), has great walls of clay and conglomerate. The softer conglomerate is quarried and broken up for its sandy dolomitic material, which, mixed with lime, makes excellent mortar. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... smells of the gorse, so nutty, Gold-like and warm: it's the prime of May Better than mortar, brick and putty, Is God's house on a blowing day. Lean me more up the mound; now I feel it: All the old heath-smells! Ain't it strange? There's the world laughing, as if to conceal it, But He's by us, juggling ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... advanced work in the Saghir Dere known as the Boomerang Redoubt was assaulted. This little fort, which was very strongly sited and protected by extra strong wire entanglements, has long been a source of trouble. After special bombardment by trench mortar, and while bombardment of surrounding trenches was at its height, part of the Border Regiment at the exact moment prescribed leapt from their trenches as one man like a pack of hounds, and pouring out of cover raced across, and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... good ground for it, is always imposing. What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she did! What fine speeches are those two: "Non omnis mortar," and "I have taken all knowledge to be my province"! Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... well pleased for her own part to be spared the noise of bricklayers and carpenters, which she escaped not without difficulty; to be spared from going among shavings and under scaffoldings, and from clambering over troughs full of mortar, etc. Papers for the walls and other ornamental things had been left to the choice of ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... could be made up of loose blocks and afterward cemented together, cannot be endorsed by the speaker, for, upon such cementing together, a shifting of the lines of resistance will take place when the load is applied. The speaker does not claim that arches are maintained by the cement or mortar joining the voussoirs together, but that the lines of pressure will be materially changed, and the same calculations are not applicable to both the ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey

... among them were two pieces taken from the Muscovites, each of them weighing 18,000 lbs. weight, and carrying a bullet of 96 lbs. weight, as much more as the greatest whole cannon carries. There was also a basilisk of nineteen feet in length, very extraordinary, and a great mortar-piece of brass of a fathom and three fingers in diameter at the mouth of it; with many other pieces of brass ordnance taken from the Poles in their wars with them, which were now but of little use; nor were those huge pieces capable to be drawn ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke

... however, that when our houses of logs had been built, we had nothing with which to make a chimney such as one finds in London. We had no bricks, and although, mayhap, flat rocks might have been found enough for two or three, there was no mortar in the whole land of Virginia with ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis

... had discharged those words, as from a mortar, before he observed Walter, whom he recognised with what may be described as a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... there is accorded to them, as though by brevet rank, all the merit of living in the county. In reference to persons so privileged, it is considered that they have been made free from the contamination of contiguous bricks and mortar by certain inner gifts, probably of birth, occasionally of profession, possibly of merit. It is very rarely, indeed, that money alone will bestow this acknowledged rank; and in Exeter, which by the stringency and excellence of its well-defined rules on such matters, may perhaps ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... a new form of mixing or pugging machine for making mortar or any other similar material. It has been designed by Mr. R.R. Gubbins, more especially for mixing emery with agglutinating material for making emery wheels; and a machine is at work on this material in the manufactory of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various

... continue to employ the primitive method of treating rice-paddy for domestic and local use. The grain is generally husked by them in a large mortar hewn from a block of molave, or other hardwood, in which it is beaten by a pestle. Sometimes two or three men or women with wooden pestles work at the same mortar. This mortar is termed, in Tagalog dialect, Luzon, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... lagoon to the farther ring of sand. Here, tossing tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters, and wreckage of houses, killed nine out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage of the lagoon. Half-drowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad mortar of the elements and battered into formless flesh. But Mapuhi was fortunate. His chance was the one in ten; it fell to him by the freakage of fate. He emerged upon the sand, bleeding from a score ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London

... associates, who generally appear of more use than ornament to the piece." Besides, were it not for them, long and disgusting soliloquies must be innumerable, especially if there be any plot in the piece of either love, ambition, or conspiracy. In short, as he again says, "they are the mortar which forms the proper cement to fix the corner stones of ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard

... the morning coffee but the tortilla. This was a thin cake made of meal from corn ground by Indian women who used for the grinding either a stone mortar and pestle, or a metate. The metate was a three-legged stone about two feet in length and one in breadth, slightly hollowed out in the center; grain was ground in this by rubbing with a smaller stone. It took a great number of tortillas to serve the large household. ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... remember, the streets of a great town, far more than country roads and lanes, hold over the long years precious, poignant memories, for a background of stones and mortar has about it a character of permanence which holds captive and echoes the scenes and ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... I mean, indignant and not unintelligent country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,—and that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxagoras was pounded! I did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by Philadelphia Editors. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... mortar is used for the purpose of pulverizing hard substances, and for mixing fluxes. As this mortar will not yield to abrasion, there is no danger of any foreign matter becoming mixed with the substance pulverized in it. It ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous

... to St. Peter, is a small structure with no pretention to architectural beauty, and almost entirely covered with ivy. It was rebuilt in 1811, a period when architectural taste was at its lowest ebb, and barbarisms in stone, brick, and mortar were very generally perpetrated. It was re-seated in 1863, during the incumbency of the Rev. E. M. Chapman. It consists of chancel, nave, vestry, and open belfry containing one bell. The chancel arch is the only remnant of a former Norman structure. The font is apparently ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... you don't understand," I said. "The trench-mortar has a soul, a mind and great discrimination," ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... in rocks of Remembrance In stones of Forbearance and mortar of Pain. The workman lays wearily granite on granite, And bleeds for his castle 'mid sunshine ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay

... and mortar on the fish line, twine and rope show that this was in all probability the means used by Miller's murderer. This is probably from the chimney. There is also some roof paint, from the edge of ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... enough and of good material? Are the floors and woodwork of good material, well seasoned, and of good workmanship? Is the hardware (locks, hinges, lighting fixtures, etc.) strong enough to stand usage? Are the outside walls of good material— if of brick, of good quality with good quality mortar; if of frame, of good lumber, well seasoned and well painted with three coats of paint? What kind of sheathing is used? Is wood well seasoned? Is the roofing of a material adapted to the climate and of good quality? What ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney

... crushed or mutilated frame, his mind shall be strong as ever. Catharine, this morning I was practising your death; but methinks I now rejoice that you may survive to tell how the poor mediciner, the pill gilder, the mortar pounder, the poison vender, met his fate, in company with the gallant Knight of Ramorny, Baron in possession and Earl of Lindores in ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... better wait for half an hour before we started a fire to let the mortar dry. The sun's pretty hot. Maybe it won't take ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie

... trade—the watch tower of the world whence the trade of the world and the political and economical bustle of the world may be observed, in a way impossible in any other part of the globe—here Marx found what he sought and needed, the bricks and mortar for his work. 'Capital' could be created ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... gate of the little garden. He must have gone before daylight, for the beds of vegetables and flowers were trampled down at random by deep footprints with long spaces between; there were marks of heels on the garden-wall and the mortar was crumbled slightly on top. The brother and sister went out on the road skirting the fortifications. There it was impossible to follow the footprints. They could tell nothing more than that Risler had gone in the direction of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... mortar bed large enough to hold the material for one course; put in unslaked quicklime in proportion to 1 to 20 or 30 of other material; throw into it plenty of water, and don't have that antediluvian idea that you ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... of imperial Rome; for the ruins of the Coliseum, the Golden House, and innumerable temples of Roman gods, and mansions of Caesars and senators, had supplied the material for all those gigantic hovels, and their walls were cemented with mortar of inestimable cost, being made of precious antique statues, burnt long ago for this ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... been a well-kept garden-plot, but now was become a mere stack of odds and ends of boards and beams, shavings, mortar, and broken brick. A long-legged fellow with a green patch over one eye was building a pair of stairs to a door beside which a sign read: "Playeres ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... (for so the painted ornaments were called) were lovelier than the work of the brotherhood of St. Martin's. Gabriel felt very proud even to grind the colours for them. But as he passed over to one of the tables and began to make ready his paint mortar, the monk who had charge of the writing-room called ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein

... were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. Try to picture the workshop, lighted at either end, and dark in the middle; the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... German name which one could not pronounce. It was impossible to tell what was his calling and what he did. When, a fortnight before, Fyodor had gone to take his measure, he, the customer, was sitting on the floor pounding something in a mortar. Before Fyodor had time to say good-morning the contents of the mortar suddenly flared up and burned with a bright red flame; there was a stink of sulphur and burnt feathers, and the room was filled with a thick pink smoke, so that Fyodor sneezed five times; and as ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... the Exposition. They made of that task, as they make of every task, a game and a play and a lark—a joy and a delight—even though they were building under the most discouraging conditions that an exposition ever encountered. But nothing daunts the Californian, and so wood and iron, mortar and paint, grew steadily into the dream city that later fronted ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin

... Arab plum pudding and mince pie and roast beef all in one. It is made by pounding meat in a mortar with wheat, until both are mixed into a soft pulp and then dressed with nuts and onions and butter, and baked or roasted in cakes over the fire. Dr. Thomson thinks that this dish is alluded to in Prov. 27:22, "Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... charge of the removal of the galley-hulk this night of the twenty-third of May is Count Corti. It is wanted at St. Romain. The gate is a hill of stone and mortar, without form; the moat almost level from side to side; and Justiniani has decided upon a barricade behind a new ditch. He will fill the hull with stones, and defend from its deck; and it must be on the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... friend. Here also is General McCallum, who has seamed the rebellious South with military roads to send victory along them, and bring back the groaning and the scarred. These and the rest are grand historic figures, worthy of all artistic depiction. They have looked so often into the mortar's mouth, that no bravo's blade can make them wince. Do you see the thin-haired, conical head of the viking Farragut, close by General Grant, with many naval heroes close behind, storm-beaten, and every inch Americans in thought ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... disadvantage than that of being obliged to leave the door, through which I had thus broken, a little open for the sake of light. After some time, I had removed a considerable part of the brick-work of the outer wall; but, when I came to the stone, I found the undertaking infinitely more difficult. The mortar which bound together the building was, by length of time, nearly petrified, and appeared to my first efforts one solid rock of the hardest adamant. I had now been six hours incessantly engaged in incredible ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... miles distant, had been burnt to the ground by Mormons, and the grain and other provisions removed or destroyed. All that remained were two enclosures surrounded by walls of cobblestone cemented with mortar, the larger one being a hundred feet square. This was appropriated for supplies, while on the smaller one lunettes were built and mounted with cannon. A sufficient garrison was stationed at this point; the cattle were sent for the winter ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... bad one. I do not blame an old military gentleman, with a brow so puckered as yours, for having little of the milk of human kindness so called: but this of breaking, by force of lies merely, and for your own uses, the hearts of poor innocent creatures, nay of grinding them slowly in the mortar, and employing their Father's hand to do it withal; this—Herr General, forgive me, but there are moments when I feel as if the extinction of probably the intensest scoundrel of that epoch might have been a ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... railway, by much the same route as did Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reaches the Medway at Strood and Rochester through a grime and gloom which hardly existed in Dickens' time to the same compromising extent that it does to-day. Bricks, mortar, belching chimneys, and roaring furnaces line the route far into the land ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... that a Catholic priest should starve to death, genteelly and pleasantly, for the good of the Protestant religion; but is it equally reasonable to expect that he should do so for the Protestant pews, and Protestant brick and mortar? On an Irish Sabbath the bell of a neat parish church often summons to church only the parson and an occasionally conforming clerk; while, two hundred yards off, a thousand Catholics are huddled together in a miserable ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... in the new world, when the fields were not destroyed by marauding parties. There were windmills that ground it coarsely and both cakes and porridge were made of it. The Indian women cracked and pounded it in a stone mortar and boiled it with fish or venison. The French brought in many ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... perishable materials, of wood or straw. It is certain that some of the most considerable stone- buildings were thatched with straw. Many seem to have been constructed without the aid of cement; and writers have contended that the Peruvians were unacquainted with the use of mortar, or cement of any kind.28 But a close, tenacious mould, mixed with lime, may be discovered filling up the interstices of the granite in some buildings; and in others, where the wellfitted blocks leave no room for this ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... the dawning of a fine morning in August, that I left the brick-and-mortar purlieus of home, and in company with two young friends, commenced this excursion. The diversified chain of the Hambleton Hills, bounding the fruitful valley of Mowbray, rose at the distance of six miles before ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various

... attentively; it was a long, narrow, little room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick-wall, the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles, stuck into mortar. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story. Whoever loiters among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in them; ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... and counsel; wherefore, giving the making of all the rest to diverse master-carvers brought from several districts, he applied himself with his brother to executing all the figures of the work, and, the whole being finished, he had them built in and put together very thoughtfully without mortar, with clamps of copper fixed with lead, to the end that the shining and polished marbles might not become discoloured; and in this he succeeded so well, with profit and honour from those who came after him, that to one who studies ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari

... while by day and takes greater share of night,—then, when it showers its leaves to the ground and stops sprouting, the wood you cut with your axe is least liable to worm. Then remember to hew your timber: it is the season for that work. Cut a mortar [1313] three feet wide and a pestle three cubits long, and an axle of seven feet, for it will do very well so; but if you make it eight feet long, you can cut a beetle [1314] from it as well. Cut a felloe three spans ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... impossible for any active communication to take place with the outside. The three rooms looked out over a small enclosed lawn, which was separated from the park by a brick wall surmounted by iron railings. All the fireplaces had been closed with bricks and mortar. ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy

... arrowroot are powdered in a mortar with a little water and then mixed by small quantities to 800 parts of boiling water. After a few minutes 200 parts of alcohol are added and the mixture filtered. The paper is immersed for two or three minutes in the warm solution and hung ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois

... a foot in width, around each piece. This border guarded the feet of the operators whose bodies were protected by steel shields on both sides of them. Then they raised a breastwork of trunks and boughs, leaving only the mouth of the cylindrical mortar visible. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... it makes it stick, just as hair does in mortar. Clay would crack with the heat. So you see, dear, there's nothing so dirty or so common that it may not be of some ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various

... bailiff had already sent him for the stables in Dresden, and ordered a funeral ceremony that seemed more suitable for a princess than for her—an oaken coffin heavily trimmed with metal, cushions of silk with gold and silver tassels, and a grave eight yards deep lined with stones and mortar. He himself stood beside the vault with his youngest child in his arms and watched the work. On the day of the funeral the corpse, white as snow, was placed in a room which he had had ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... a few from her box. They were longer and finer than O-Kin's, and as they unfolded, the children screamed with delight. A man in a boat, with a pole and line, was catching a fish; a rice mortar floated alongside a wine-cup; the Mikado's crest bumped the Tycoon's; a tortoise swam; a stork unfolded its wings; a candle, a fan, a gourd, an axe, a frog, a rat, a sprig of bamboo, and pots full of many-colored flowers sprung open before their eyes. ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... and their own accession) the coat, the immortal coat, unchanged! The waistcoat is of a material known only to themselves—a sort of nightmare illusion of velvet, covered with a slight tracery of refined mortar, curiously picked out and guarded with a nondescript collection of the very greenest green pellets of hyson-bloom gunpowder tea. The buttons (things of use in this garment) describe the figure and proportions of a large turbot. They consist of two rows (leaving imagination to fill up a lapse of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various

... upright progress on this whirling ball, or keep up the fire of his bodily life. And hence it is that money stands in the first rank of considerations and so powerfully affects the choice. For our society is built with money for mortar; money is present in every joint of circumstance; it might be named the social atmosphere, since, in society, it is by that alone that men continue to live, and only through that or chance that they can reach or affect one another. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... are the fourteen lives lost on the Italian bark Giovanni near Provincetown, Cape Cod, in a storm unprecedented for its terrors. A story found its way into the papers at the time that the powder used in the mortar was damp, and that from this trifling neglect help could not be extended from the station. A strict investigation was made, and it was proved by the testimony of the people in Provincetown that all the apparatus ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... in order to deny the bees the possession of intellect other than may vaguely stir within the narrow prison of an extraordinary but unchanging instinct. "Show us," they say, "a single case where the pressure of events has inspired them with the idea, for instance, of substituting clay or mortar for wax or propolis; show us this, and we will admit their capacity ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... now enters, is a stone-cutter and mason, much employed in patching dilapidated graves and cutting inscriptions, and popularly known in Bumsteadville, on account of the dried mortar perpetually hanging about him, as "Old Mortarity." He is a ricketty man, with a chronic disease called bar-roomatism, and so very grave-yardy in his very 'Hic' that one almost expects a jacet to follow it as a ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various

... judging from its appearance, had long been abandoned. It occupied, however, a very strong position, and if the Spaniards had had any energy or enterprise they would have put it in repair and mounted in it a modern mortar which lay on a couple of skids near the pier, and two or three small rapid-fire guns which they might have obtained from one of Admiral Cervera's cruisers. Antiquated and obsolete as it was, it might then have been of ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... was halfway up his leg, and rising fast. Their danger was but beginning. Would the old walls, in greater part built without mortar, stand the rush? If a tree should strike them, they hardly would! If the flood came from a waterspout, it would soon be over—only how high it might first rise, who could tell! Such were his thoughts as they struggled to the ruin, and stood up at the end of a wall parallel ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... the key-stone or wedge accurately placed in all of them. Some parts of the wall, towards the interior ballium, are not built of squared freestone; but of the dark stone of the country, disposed in a zig-zag, or, as it is more commonly called, in a herring-bone direction, with a great deal of mortar in the interstices: the buttresses, or rather piers, are of small projection, but great width. The upper story, destroyed about forty years since, was of a different style of architecture. According to an old print,[201] it terminated with a large battlement, and bartizan towers at the angles. ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... southern shire in quite a rural district, among mills and ash-trees, and houses with gardens and garden bowers, William and Dulcie were combating real flesh-and-blood woes—woes that would not so much set your teeth on edge, as soften and melt your tough, dry heart—among the bricks and mortar of London. These several years were not light sunshiny years to the young couple. It is of no use saying that a man may prosper if he will, and that he has only to cultivate potatoes and cabbages in place of jessamine and passion flowers; no use making examples ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... villages, scattered about to an extent of a full day's journey, containing about 12,000 inhabitants, two-thirds Moors, the rest Arabs, Negroes, and Jews. The houses and other buildings make but a mean appearance, built of mud and stones, and some of lime-mortar. There are a few Marabets shining beautifully white in the sun, with light and chaste cupola tops. A drawing of one of these is given, that of Sidi Salah. The Marabet is a common, but fair and picturesque, feature in coast ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... place he loathed and execrated a year ago, he could have embraced the stranger in the street. Those miles of pavement, those towering walls that seemed to make streets of the sky as he looked up, all that world of brick and mortar was Audrey's world, the ground for her feet, the scene of all her doings. The women that went by wore the fashions she would be wearing now. At any moment she herself might turn out of some shop-door, round some corner. A faint hope ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... hanging in a silken altar, From oaths and covenants, and being pounded in a mortar, From contributions, or free-quarter, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... drove somewhere to look at sand for mortar, and the horse took fright and wheeled round and pitched George out, bruising him in several places, but doing no serious harm. But I shudder when I think how the meaning might be taken out of everything ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... uniform granite blocks so laid and bonded that, after resting there for ages, a knife-blade could not be introduced between the joints. On careful examination it appeared that no composition either of cement or mortar had ever been employed in this masonry, the builders confining themselves to proper foundation and perfect matching together of the stones. At Tokio, the Shiba temple, curious, strange, and interesting as it was, lost effect by the neighborhood of ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou



Words linked to "Mortar" :   howitzer, building material, trench mortar, high-angle gun, plaster, cement, masonry, mortar fire, vessel



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